Why Google wants to stop me blogging

Why Google wants to stop me blogging

If you are posting original content on Facebook or Twitter, you’re stupid. No polite way to put it. You’re an idiot. Every day I see great thoughts, photos and other inspiring original content posted on Facebook and it makes me cringe. It is like cooking an interesting organic and original meal and then giving it away to McDonald’s to sell for you. It is also inexcusable because there are so many easy ways around it.

When blogging started it was just that. Blogging. Horrible aesthetics for web logs= very rough diary like things. But now you have Tumblr and all sorts of prettier choices. You can put your stuff in your website and then get it to automatically update Facebook, Twitter or almost anything else you want. But you control the environment in which your content lives and breathes. You organise it as you want it presented, not as Facebook deems best in its latest incarnation.

Yeah, even those witty one liners you are posting on Twitter. Post them in your world and then think where you are distributing them.

There is however a larger picture on this issue. And that is that even Google is keen to stop you blogging. The demise of the blogger.com platform is intentional. Because if you are controlling a “castle” of a blog with all your information and all it’s unique traffic, they can’t make money out of it as easily. You might even start to want to sell banners yourself! Facebook and Google+ or Twitter are in effect using you as slave journalists and content producers. They make the interface and the media chanel, you provide the content. Sure, loads of it is rubbish, but even rubbish provides really useful data about how you, and your friends, think. What they like, what they shop, where they go.

Blogger isn’t one of Google’s failures. It was useful when it started and now it is purposely being winded down. They don’t completely cancel the service as it provides useful information. And WordPress would simply be too powerful if left unchecked. But now they want most of you to start working for them for free on Google+…